Three Years in California

COLTON, Walter.

Three Years in California.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1949.

With excerpts from the author's Deck and Port and a selection of his letters from Monterey; introduction and notes by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur. 8vo. Engraved frontispiece portrait of Colton with facsimile signature; a further engraved portrait; editor's notes and index. Tan cloth, front board stamped in brown with a vaquero-and-lasso device. Owner's signature and address label; dampstaining and foxing to the endpapers; soiling and spotting to the cloth. A printed leaf headed “Bar-Room in California,” with an engraving and a quoted passage, laid in.

Colton was a United States Navy chaplain when Commodore Stockton made him alcalde of Monterey in 1846 — mayor, judge and sheriff at once, across a district of some three hundred miles. The journal covers those three years: the American military occupation, the social life and customs of Monterey, the missions, and the settlements he rode out to see. He impaneled California's first jury in September 1846, twelve Spanish and American men hearing a case of property and slander; that August he and Robert Semple printed the first issue of The Californian, the first newspaper published in California; and he raised the town hall, finished in 1849 and paid for with convict labor, liquor taxes and gambling fines, which the citizens named Colton Hall and where the state constitutional convention met that year. From May 1848 the book turns to gold — the blacksmiths, carpenters and servants walking off for the mines, Colton's own visit to the diggings two months later, and his judgment that California's future lay in its farmland rather than its gold.

SKU TO-2026-150